Neighbourhood Trees Campaign launched on International Mother Earth Day

Neighbourhood Trees Campaign was launched on International Mother Earth Day by the India Biodiversity Portal on 22 April 2014. The Campaign will be organized from 22 April to 27 April 2014.

It is a unique citizen science project that aims to document tree species across the country through crowd sourcing. The Crowd sourcing is the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of online community.

Neighbourhood Trees campaign is probably the first Crowd sourcing project in India. Such crowd-sourcing projects have been popular in the West.

The campaign is part of the TreesIndia group activity on the India Biodiversity Portal in association with ATREE, SeasonWatch, Nizhal (Chennai), Keystone Foundation (Kotagiri), Strand Life Sciences and Azim Premji University.

The aim of the online campaign is to spread awareness on the importance of trees and to aggregate information on tree diversity across the country. As a part of campaign, volunteers need to click photographs of trees in their gardens and neighbourhood and sign up at treesindia.in and upload their observations.

The campaign hopes to create a page for each of the around 7500 tree species across India. All data gathered will be openly accessible and in the public domain. It will also popularise the portal and help it grow into a rich and open-access repository on biodiversity.

Some of the Citizen participation based environment documentation and conservation programmes in India and across the World are: tree census project by the Chennai Corporation and the Neralu tree festival in Bangalore, SeasonsWatch, Eflora India and the Million Tress initiative in New York.

About India Biodiversity Portal
India Biodiversity Portal is a unique repository of information on biodiversity of India. The Portal aims to provide open and free access to biodiversity information. It enables widespread participation by all citizens in contributing to and accessing information on Indian biodiversity.

The portal intends to mobilise a collaborative community that will build high-quality map-based multimedia information on India's biodiversity.